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Premium Research

You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus Systems, one of the first private cloud platform providers to describe itself as such, is probably at least passingly familiar to many. Essentially, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, the company’s flagship product (a free, entirely open source community edition is also available), enables IT pros to turn commodity hardware into an elastic, scalable private cloud, with Amazon EC2 and S3 API support a huge selling point.

Indeed, Amazon Web Services was so taken with how well Eucalyptus played with its ecosystem that it named the company its official private cloud partner, with AWS officially supporting workload bursting and portability between Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition and its public cloud platform.

When it comes to OpenStack, there’s some latent enmity there: Eucalyptus was the original platform that powered Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, but as of Ubuntu Server 11.10, OpenStack became the default (though Eucalyptus is still an option).

It speaks to a certain philosophical rift between the two. OpenStack is putting a lot of backbone into quickly building an ecosystem of public and private cloud providers with open standards. Meanwhile, Eucalyptus is getting cozy with the currently winning team.

It’s certainly a valid approach, and one that was validated by last week’s announcement that Eucalyptus Systems had raised $30 million in Series C funding. And even before AWS singled out Eucalyptus, it was a successful solo act that could lay claim to being the most widely-deployed private cloud platform out there. But while Eucalyptus has Amazon’s muscle behind it, OpenStack has Dell, HP, Intel, Canonical and many other major market forces behind it, rapidly beefing up the platform’s marketability.

CloudStack

Even before Citrix handed its CloudStack platform – which it owned thanks to the acquisition of Cloud.com in 2011 – over to the Apache Foundation and largely walked away from the OpenStack project, there was some consternation over how the two could possibly coexist. Two open source-based cloud platforms that made workload portability a priority was seen by many as just one too many.

The thing with CloudStack and OpenStack, as I hinted in some of my impressions from last week’s OpenStack Conference, is that while it’s certainly no longer the buzzworthy project it once was, it’s not in the elephant graveyard just yet. Before Citrix killed its participation in the product, CloudStack was a commercially-available platform that many service providers were using in production environments.

And while CloudStack can’t brag about having the major leagues of tech helping develop it, the Apache Foundation generally knows what it’s doing, and has big plans for the platform. There is every possibility that the platform will attract enough interest from the open source community that it’s going to put itself back in the spotlight. Besides, CloudStack community members Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper aren’t exactly lightweights.

But it’s not really a competition, either. CloudStack supports the OpenStack Swift object storage system, and the two projects are collaborating on a framework to verify AWS compatibility, or so I’m informed. With both OpenStack and CloudStack available freely to the open source community, the two can mature together while also competing for customers.

Joyent

In a relatively shameless grab for customers and developers, service provider Joyent spread flyers around the OpenStack Conference’s developer lounge, promoting a special package deal designed to appeal to those in attendance who have yet to make up their mind about cloud platforms.

Basically, Joyent is reaching out with its SmartDataCenter Adoption Program, encouraging users to take advantage of a program that would give new customers a year’s license for its SmartDataCenter private cloud platform software, a main operationsserver license and two node licenses, as well as basic-level support.

Joyent SmartDataCenter is based on the open source Joyent SmartOS cloud operating system, itself a fork of Illumos, and which Joyent has based its public cloud offerings on for the better part of a decade. Digging into SmartOS’ FAQ, it appears more than possible to use SmartOS in conjunction with an orchestration platform like CloudStack, OpenStack or Eucalyptus for a free private cloud with many of the same advantages.

Joyent’s flyer says that, compared to an OpenStack deployment, SmartDataCenter can offer the same performance with half the servers, twice the security, and a third of the cost. It’s clearly designed to appeal to those who question OpenStack’s production readiness – it’s open source-based, sort of, supports KVM for any x86 OS, and it’ll turn right on.

It’s not exactly competing in the same market as Eucalyptus, CloudStack or OpenStack. But I’m including Joyent for that same audacity in going right to the OpenStack community for new customers, for building on top of the open-source SmartOS, and for the service provider’s extraordinary claim in the flyer that “once you get up and running with a Joyent-powered cloud, you’ll want to standardize on Joyent technology.”

Your Angle

For those of you who have test-driven or fully deployed one or more of these cloud platforms, what’s your take? Can OpenStack catch up to more established, open source-friendly platforms?